We’re here, We’re queer, and We’re not going Shopping without Coupons

The fact is, many spiritual traditions aren’t welcoming of the LGBTQ community. So it is refreshing, and worth talking about, when they are. Even better when they are specifically about us!

While some people find that regular attendance at a church, temple, meditation center and/or mosque suits them, another option is to look into spiritual retreats. They usually happen on weekends, though longer retreats can be a week or more (in which case many people use vacation time, and consider it time well spent).

I myself have attended a number of retreats over the years, some of them silent retreats (no talking, no writing, no reading, no eye contact), some of them more interactive. While I personally attend a weekly practice in NYC, I have found that a retreat can give a deeper, more sustained experience. A retreat gets you completely out of your daily routine (I guess that’s why they call them ‘retreats’), and lets you focus much more than the hour or so of a weekly meeting.

But let’s face it: most retreats are for the general public (i.e., the straight majority) and even if they are very welcoming of gays, it can still feel like you don’t fit in.

One upcoming retreat specifically for gay, bisexual and transgendered men and women is “Spirituality and Intimacy” on April 27-29 in Garrison NY, about an hour north of New York City. It is not based in any one religious tradition, and welcomes women and men with any, or no, spiritual background.

This retreat teaches a variety of ancient and modern practices to discover and embrace one’s own spiritual gifts. The description on the website reads:

Spiritual practice is the “axe that breaks the frozen sea within us.” Embedded in each of our souls is an ancient, profound longing for love. As our hearts begin to thaw, this longing is released and healing insights about our lives unfold naturally. Through gentle but powerful processes, we will work with these insights as invaluable personal lessons in our journeys toward love.

The director of this retreat is Ken Page, a widely recognized psychotherapist, lecturer, and licensed clinical social worker, and founder of Deeper Dating.

Of course this retreat has a cost, depending on whether you want your own room ($416), a double ($361) or a triple/quad ($296). Frankly, for a two and a half day retreat including the cost of food, accommodations and instruction, these are great rates. And for those who might struggle financially, the retreat organizers offer partial scholarships.

Nina has discussed her personal search for gay-friendly spirituality, and shared her debates on figuring out an appropriate financial contribution. Another approach is to know the total cost of making a spiritual opportunity available, and understand what is your fair share. That is: total cost / number of people = cost per person. When you’re talking about an ongoing community, this is hard. When you’re talking about a one-time event, it’s pretty easy.

Coming from the world of corporate training as I do, I can share with you that technical training can run $1200 per person PER DAY, and executive coaching costs $300 to $500 PER HOUR. One can argue that such investments have a direct link to a financial payoff, hence worth the money.

But then how do we figure the value of a spiritual retreat? I say: you can’t. Oscar Wilde (one of our clan), wrote in his comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan, that a cynic “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

I think it is wrong-headed to try to assign a financial value for spiritual opportunities: they are priceless. It doesn’t compute. But it’s also a fact that these opportunities do incur costs in making them available: physical space, meals, materials, the time of the expert facilitators. And I think it’s right to know one’s fair share of the total and pay up (or earn a scholarship, often through volunteering one’s time). I would resent a significant “markup” above the actual costs, and that happens to be a great way to spot a cult (which I define as a cynical attempt to gain power and/or money by manipulating people).

But if we believe that investing in ourselves is worth anything, the way we invest in our homes, our education, and our future financial security, then I do support investing in our search for meaning, and finding our place in the universe. When these opportunities are not only gay-friendly but specifically developed for our community, then sign me up.

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One Response to “Gay Spirituality & Intimacy: Priceless”

I really appreciate this post for reasons you well know. I personally have no problem with meditation and silent retreats whatsoever, regardless of how connected they are to traditional religious practices or how syncretistic they might or might not be.

Enter money. Retreat centers, like traditional and New Age churches or psychotherapists can have a financial interest in keeping one coming, though. How much of what we are being taught to think and feel or led to experience is designed, whether consciously or not, to keep the pews, retreat centers and coffers full? My point is to say that whatever spiritual value we find in these kinds of experiences should (I would argue) be mediated by a critical impulse to not divorce the sacred from the mundane. All in all, am I experiencing something I would want to call “religious” even after accounting for a pastor’s heavy-handed attempt to grow a church? Why? What kinds of relationships sustain me in ways that elude the logic of rational profit? I don’t think there is a pat answer because it’s always contextual and case specific but keeping the logic of money in the forefront is a worthy practice, I think. In the end, doing this also better allows me to experience for myself what’s priceless and irreducible. And there is no easy answer to determining whether an institution is really a glorified store dressed up in church clothing or an institution struggling to negotiate the real material demands placed on it. I’ve experienced both and have made a judgment when it needed to be made.

As for the specifically LGBT issues. I am very glad these opportunities are there for us but I would also qualify my enthusiasm this way: there is no “gay spirituality” I’d want to claim is or can be intelligible to all LGBT people. “Gay spirituality” is no essential or metaphysical thing and gay people have no special spiritual organ”it’s a market niche that can serve the still very important purpose of community building. I get very worried about attempts to define a gay aesthetic or spirituality replete with a set of virtues and attributes both because they will always exclude many (some of us simply won’t relate and will be excluded) and because making necessary connections between LGBT identity and certain cultural associations (e.g., let’s say empathy, awareness, libidinal un-repression etc.) is dangerous and can be used against us the way other associations (e.g., nurturance, care, devotion, self-sacrifice) have been used against women. I’m not sure you were implying this but the qualification matters to me a lot.

If your readers are interested in the critical issue of spirituality and money there is no better book than “Selling Spirituality” by Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, both British scholars of religion. I could not recommend it more highly. It takes on the tough issues of how spirituality can be packaged and commodified in order to serve business interests first and foremost and has helped me nuance the kinds of questions I want to ask of the practices they explore. Worth checking out!